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BERNARD SHAW 

THE SANITY OF ART 




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THE SANITY OF ART 



BY 



opor^ BERNARD SHAW 



BOISTI AND LIVERIGHT 

PUBLISHERS N E W YORK 






Copyright, 1895, by 
G. BERNARD SHAW 



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PREFACE 

The re-publication of this open letter to 
Mr. Benjamin Tucker, places me, not for 
the first time, in the difficulty of the jour- 
nalist whose work survives the day on 
which it was written. What the journalist 
writes about is what everybody is thinking 
about (or ought to be thinking about) at 
the moment of writing. To revive his 
utterances when everybody is thinking about 
something else ; when the tide of public 
thought and imagination has turned ; when 
the front of the stage is filled with new 
actors ; when many lusty crowers have 
either survived their vogue or perished with 
it ; when the little men you patronized 
have become great, and the great men you 
attacked have been sanctified and pardoned 



by popular sentiment in the tomb : all 
these inevitables test the quality of your, 
journalism very severely. 

Nevertheless, journalism is the highest 
form of literature ; for all the highest lite- 
rature is journalism. The writer who aims 
at producing the platitudes which are "not 
for an age, but for all time " has his re- 
ward in being unreadable in all ages ; 
whilst Plato and Aristophanes trying to 
knock some sense into the Athens of their 
day, Shakspear peopling that same Athens 
with Elizabethan mechanics and Warwick- 
shire hunts, Ibsen photographing the local 
doctors and vestrymen of a Norwegian par- 
ish, Carpaccio painting the life of St. Ursu- 
la exactly as if she were a lady living in 
the next street to him, are still alive and 
at home everywhere among the dust and 
ashes of thousands of academic, punctilious, 



archaeologically correct men of letters and 
art who spent their lives haughtily avoiding 
the journalist's vulgar obsession with the 
ephemeral. 

I also am a journalist, proud of it, de- 
liberately cutting out of my works all that 
is not journalism, convinced that nothing 
that is not journalism will live long as lite- 
rature, or be of any use whilst it does live. 
I deal with all periods ; but I never study 
any period but the present, which I have 
not yet mastered and never shall ; and as 
a dramatist I have no clue to any histori- 
cal or other personage save that part of 
him which is also myself, and which may 
be nine tenths of him or ninety-nine hun- 
dredths, as the case may be (if, indeed, I 
do not transcend the creature), but which, 
anyhow, is all that can ever come within 
my knowledge of his soul. /The man who 



writes about himself and his own time is 
the only man who writes about all people 
and about all timer. The other sort of 
man, who believed that he and his period 
are so distinct from all other men and peri- 
ods that it would be immodest and irrele- 
vant to allude to them or assume that they 
could interest anyone but himself and his 
contemporaries, is the most infatuated of all 
the egotists, and consequently the most un- 
readable and negligible of all the authors. 
And so, let others cultivate what they call 
literature : journalism for me ! 

The following remnant of the journalism 
of 1895 will, I hope, bear out these prelim- 
inary remarks, which are none the less val- 
id because they are dragged in here to dis- 
mount the critics who ride the high horse 
of Letters at me. It was undertaken under 
the following circumstances. In 1893 Doc- 



tor Max Nordau, one of those remarkable 
cosmopolitan Jews who go forth against 
modern civilization as David went against 
the Philistines or Charles Martel against the 
Saracens, smiting it hip and thigh without 
any sense of common humanity with it, 
trumped up an indictment of its men of 
genius as depraved lunatics, and pled it (in 
German) before the bar of Europe under 
the title Entartung. It was soon translated 
for England and America as Degeneration. 
Like all rigorous and thorough-going sallies 
of special pleading, it has its value ; for 
the way to get at the merits of a case is 
not to listen to the fool who imagines him- 
self impartial, but to get it argued with 
reckless bias for and against. To under- 
stand a saint,, you must hear the devil's ad- 
vocate ; and the same is true of the artist. 
Nordau had briefed himself as devil's advo- 



8 

cate against the great artistic reputations of 
the XIX century ; and he did his duty as 
well as it could be done at the price, inci- 
dentally saying many more true and im- 
portant things than most of the counsel on 
the other side were capable of. 

Indeed counsel on the other side mostly 
threw up their briefs in consternation, and 
began to protest that they entirely agreed 
with Dr. Nordau, and that though they had 
perhaps dallied a little with Rossetti, Wag- 
ner, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Nietzsche and the rest 
of the degenerates before their true charac- 
ter had been exposed, yet they had never 
really approved of them. Even those who 
stood to their guns had not sufficient vari- 
ety of culture to contradict the cosmopoli- 
tan doctor on more than one or two points, 
being often not champions of Art at large, 
but merely jealous fanciers of some particu- 



9 

lar artist. Thus the Wagnerians were 
ready to give up Ibsen; the Ibsenites were 
equally suspicious of Wagner ; the Tolstoy- 
ans gave up both ; the Nietzscheans were 
only too glad to see Tolstoy catching it ; 
and the connoisseurs of Impressionism in 
painting, though fairly impartial in music 
and literature, could not handle the technics 
of the case for them. Yet Dr. Nordau's 
case was so bad, and his technical utter- 
ances on painting and music so much more 
absurd than Captain Lemuel Gulliver's nau- 
tical observations, that I, being familiar 
with all the arts, and accustomed to the re- 
volutionary climate of Jewish cosmopolitan- 
ism, looked on at his triumph much as Na- 
poleon looked on at the massacre of the 
Swiss, thinking how easy it would be to 
change the rout into the cheapest of victor- 
ies. However, none of our silly editors had 



10 

the gumption to offer me the command ; 
so, like Napoleon, I went home and left 
them to be cut to pieces. 

But Destiny will not allow her offers to 
be completely overlooked. In the Easter of 
1895, when Nordau was master of the field, 
and the newspaper champions of modern 
Literature and Art were on their knees be- 
fore him, weeping and protesting their inno- 
cence, I was staying in the wooden hotel on 
Beachy Head, with a select party of Fabi- 
ans, politicians, and philosophers, diligently 
trying to ride a bicycle for the first time in 
my life. My efforts set the coastguards 
laughing as no audience had ever laughed 
at my plays. I made myself ridiculous with 
such success that I felt quite ready to begin 
on somebody else. Just then there arrived 
a proposal from Mr. Benjamin Tucker, phi- 
losophic Anarchist, and editor of an Ameri- 



11 

can paper called Liberty, which, as it was 
written valiantly up to its title, was having 
a desperate struggle for existence in a coun- 
try where every citizen is free to suppress 
liberty, and usually does so in such mo- 
ments as he cares to spare from the pursuit 
of money. Mr. Tucker, seeing that nobody 
had answered Dr. Nordau, and perceiving 
with the penetration of an unterrified com- 
monsense that a doctor who had written 
manifest nonsense must be answerable tech- 
nically by anybody who could handle his 
weapons, was of opinion that I was the 
man to do it. Accordingly, said Mr. 
Tucker, I invite you, Shaw, to ascertain the 
highest price that has ever been paid to 
any man, even to Gladstone, for a maga- 
zine article ; and I will pay you that price 
for a review of Degeneration in the columns 
of Liberty. 



12 

This was really great editing. Mr. 
Tucker got his review, as he deserved, and 
sent a copy of the number of Liberty con- 
taining it (now a collector's treasure), to 
every paper in the United States. There 
was a brisk and quick sale of copies in 
London among the cognoscenti. And De- 
generation was never heard of again. It is 
open to the envious to contend that this 
was a mere coincidence — that the Degenera- 
tion boom was exhausted at that moment ; 
but I naturally prefer to believe that Mr. 
Tucker and I slew it. I may add that the 
slaughter incidentally ruined Mr. Tucker, as 
a circulation among cognoscenti does not 
repay the cost of a free distribution to the 
Philistines ; but Mr. Tucker was always 
ruining himself for Liberty and always re- 
trieving the situation by his business abil- 
ity. I saw him this year in London, as 



13 

prosperous looking a man as I could desire 
to dine with, and eager for fresh struggles 
with the courts and public departments of 
the United States. 

It may now be asked why, if the work 
of my essay be done, I need revive it after 
twelve years of peaceful burial. I should 
answer : partly because Mr. Tucker wishes 
to reproduce his editorial success in a more 
permanent form, and is strongly seconded 
by Messrs. Holbrook Jackson and A. R. 
Orage in England, who have piously pre- 
served a copy of Liberty and desire to 
make it the- beginning of their series of 
pamphlets in connection with their paper 
The New Age and their pet organization, 
The Arts Group of the Fabian Society ; 
partly because on looking through it myself 
again, I find that as far as it goes it is 
still readable and likely to be helpful to 



14 

those who are confused by the eternal strife 
between the artist-philosophers and the 
Philistines. 

I have left the essay substantially as it 
first appeared, the main alteration being an 
expansion of the section dealing with the 
importance of the mass of law which lies 
completely outside morals and religion, and 
is really pure convention : the point being, 
not that the course prescribed by such law 
is ethically right, or indeed better in any 
sense than its direct opposite (as in the rule 
of the road, for example), but that it is 
absolutely necessary for economy and 
smoothness of social action that everybody 
should do the same thing and be able to 
count on everybody else doing it. I have 
appropriated this from Mr. Aylmer Maude's 
criticism of Tolstoy an Anarchism, on which 
I am unable to improve. 



15 

I have also, with the squeamishness of 
advancing years, softened one or two ex- 
pressions which now shock me as uncivil to 
Dr. Nordau. In doing so I am not offer- 
ing him the insult of an attempt to spare 
his feelings : I am simply trying to mend 
my own manners. 

Finally, let me say that though I think 
this essay of mine did dispose of Dr. Nor- 
dau's special pleadings, neither the plead- 
ings nor the criticism dispose of the main 
question as to how far genius is a morbid 
symptom. I should rather like Dr. Nordau 
to try again ; for I do not see how any 
observant student of genius from the life 
can deny that the Arts have their criminals 
and lunatics as well as their sane and hon- 
est men (they are more or less the same 
men too, just as our ordinary criminals are 
in the dock by the accident of a single 



16 

transaction and not by a difference in na- 
ture between them and the judge and jury), 
and that the notion that the great poet and 
artist can do no wrong is as mischievously 
erroneous as the notion that the King can 
do no wrong or that the Pope is infallible 
or that the power which created all three 
did not do its own best for them. 

In my last play, The Doctor's Dilemma, 
I have emphasized this by dramatizing a 
rascally genius, with the disquieting result 
that several intelligent and sensitive persons 
have passionately defended him, on the 
ground, apparently, that high artistic fac- 
ulty and an ardent artistic imagination en- 
title a man to be recklessly dishonest about 
money and recklessly selfish about women 
just as kingship in an African tribe entitles 
a man to kill whom he pleases on the most 
trifling provocation. I know no harder 



17 

practical question than Jiow much selfishness 
one ought to stand from a gifted person for 
the sake of his gifts or on the chance of 
his being right in the long run. The Su- 
perman will certainly come like a thief in 
the night, and be shot at accordingly ; but 
we cannot leave our property wholly unde- 
fended on that account. On the other 
hand, we cannot ask the Superman simply 
to add a higher set of virtues to current 
respectable morals ; for he is undoubtedly 
going to empty a good deal of respectable 
morality out like so much dirty water, and 
replace it by new and strange customs, 
shedding old obligations and accepting new 
and heavier ones. Every step of his pro- 
gress must horrify conventional people ; and 
if it were possible for even the most supe- 
rior man to march ahead all the time, 
every pioneer of the march towards the Su- 



18 

perman would be crucified. Fortunately 
what actually happens is that your geniuses 
are for the most part keeping step and 
marking time with the rest, an occasional 
stumble forward being the utmost they can 
accomplish, often visibly against their own 
notions of propriety. The greatest possible 
difference in conduct between a genius and 
his contemporaries is so small that it is 
always difficult to persuade the people who 
are in daily contact with the gifted one 
that he is anybody in particular : all the 
instances to the contrary (Gorki scandalizing 
New York, for example) being cases in 
which the genius is in conflict, not with 
contemporary feeling in his own class, but 
with some institution which is far behind 
the times, like the institution of marriage in 
Russia (to put it no nearer home). In 
really contemporary situations, your genius 



19 

is ever 1 part genius and 99 parts Tory. 
Still, especially when we turn from con- 
duct to the expression of opinion — from 
what the man of genius dares do to what 
he dares advocate — it is necessary for the 
welfare of society that genius should be 
privileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, to 
outrage good taste, to corrupt the youthful 
mind, and, generally, to scandalize its 
uncles. But as such license is accordable 
only on the assumption that men of genius 
are saner, sounder, farther sighted and 
deeper fathoming than the uncles, it is idle 
to demand unlimited toleration of appar- 
ently outrageous conduct on the plea* that 
the offender is a genius, even when by the 
abnormal development of some specific tal- 
ent he may be highly skilled as an artist. 
Andrea del Sarto was a better draughtsman 
and fresco painter than Raphael ; but he 



20 

was a swindler all the same ; and no hon- 
orable artist would plead on his behalf that 
misappropriating trust money is one of the 
superiorities of that very loosely defined 
diathesis which we call the artistic tempera- 
ment. If Dr. Nordau would make a serious 
attempt to shew us exactly where we are in 
this matter by ascertaining the real stig- 
mata of genius, so that we may know 
whom to crucify, and whom to put above 
the law, he will place the civilization he 
attacks under an obligation which will wipe 
out the marks of all the wounds (mostly 
thoroughly deserved) he has dealt it. 
London, July, 1907. 



THE SANITY OF ART. 



My dear Tucker : 

I have read Max Nordau's Degeneration at 
vour request: two hundred and sixty thou- 
sand mortal words, saying the same thing 
over and over again. That is the proper 
way to drive a thing into the mind of the 
world, though Nordau considers it a symptom 
of insane "obsession" on the part of writers 
who do not share his own opinions. His mes- 
sage to the world is that all our characteristi- 
cally modern works of art are symptoms of 
disease in the artists, and that these diseased 
artists are themselves symptoms of the nervous 
exhaustion of the race by overwork. 

To me, who am a professional critic of art, 
and have for many successive London seasons 
had to watch the grand march past of books, 



22 



of pictures, of concerts and operas, and of 
stage plays, there is nothing new in Dr. 
Nordau's outburst. I have heard it all before. 
At every new wave of energy in art the same 
alarm has been raised; and as these alarms 
always had their public, like prophecies of the 
end of the world, there is nothing surprising 
in the fact that a book which might have 
been produced by playing the resurrection 
man in the old newspaper rooms of our public 
libraries, and collecting all the exploded 
bogey-criticisms of the last half-century into 
a huge volume, should have a considerable 
success. To give you an idea of the heap of 
material ready to hand for such a compila- 
tion, let me lay before you a sketch of one or 
two of the Reformations I have myself wit- 
nessed in the fine arts. 



23 



IMPRESSIONISM 

When I was engaged chiefly in the criticism 
of pictures, the Impressionist movement was 
struggling for life in London; and I sup- 
ported it vigorously because, being the out- 
come ,of heightened attention and quickened 
consciousness on the part of its disciples, it 
was evidently destined to improve pictures 
greatly by substituting a natural, observant, 
real style for a conventional, taken-for- 
granted, ideal one. The result has entirely 
justified my choice of sides. I can remember 
when Mr. Whistler, in order to force the pub- 
lic to observe the qualities he was introducing 
into pictorial work, had to exhibit a fine 
drawing of a girl with the head deliberately 
crossed out with a few rough pencil strokes, 
knowing perfectly well that if he left a 
woman's face discernible the British Philistine 
would simply look to see whether she was a 



pretty girl or not, or whether she represented 
some of his pet characters in fiction, and pass 
on without having seen any of the qualities of 
artistic execution which made the drawing 
valuable. But it was easier for the critics to 
resent the obliteration of the face as an in- 
solent eccentricity, and to shew their own 
good manners by writing of Mr. Whistler as 
Jimmy, than to think out what he meant. It 
took several years of " propaganda by deed " 
before the qualities which the Impressionists 
insisted on came to be looked for as matter of 
course in pictures; so that at last the keen 
picture-gallery frequenter, when he came face 
to face with Bouguereau's Girl in a Cornfield, 
could no longer accept it as a window-glimpse 
of nature, but saw at a glance that the girl is 
really standing in a studio with what the 
house agents call a good north light, and that 
the cornfield is a conventional sham. This 
advance in the education of our art fanciers 
was effected by persistently exhibiting pictures 
which, like Mr. Whistler's girl with her head 



25 



scratched out, were propagandist samples of 
workmanship rather than complete works of 
art. But the moment Mr. Whistler and his 
party forced the dealers and the societies of 
painters to exhibit these studies, and, by do- 
ing so, to accustom the public to tolerate what 
appeared to it at first to be absurdities, the 
door was necessarily opened to real absurd- 
ities. It is exceedingly difficult to draw or 
paint well: it is exceedingly easy to smudge 
paper or canvas so as to suggest a picture just 
as the stains on an old ceiling or the dark 
spots in a glowing coal-fire do. Plenty of 
rubbish of this kind was produced, exhibited, 
and tolerated at the time when people could 
not see the difference between any daub in 
which there were aniline shadows and a land- 
scape by Monet. Not that they thought the 
daub as good as the Monet: they thought the 
Monet as ridiculous as the daub; but they 
were afraid to say so, because they had discov- 
ered that people who were good judges did 
not think Monet ridiculous. 



26 



Then, besides the mere impostors, there 
were certain unaffected and conscientious 
painters who produced abnormal pictures be- 
cause they saw abnormally. My own sight 
happens to be M normal " in the oculist's 
sense: that is, I see things with the naked eye 
as most people can only be made to see them 
by the aid of spectacles. Once I had a dis- 
cussion with an artist who was shewing me a 
clever picture of his in which the parted lips 
in a pretty woman's face revealed what seemed 
to me like a mouthful of virgin snow. The 
painter lectured me for not consulting my eyes 
instead of my knowledge of facts. " You 
don't see the divisions in a set of teeth when 
you look at a person's mouth," he said: " all 
you see is a strip of white, or yellow, or pearl, 
as the case may be. But because you know, 
as a matter of anatomic fact, that there are 
divisions there, you want to have them repre- 
sented by strokes in a drawing. That is just 
like you art critics &c, &c." I do not think 
he believed me when I told him that when I 



n 



looked at a row of teeth, I saw, not only the 
divisions between them, but their exact shape, 
both in contour and in modelling, just as well 
as I saw their general color. Some of the 
most able of the Impressionists evidently did 
not see forms as definitely as they appreciated 
color relationship; and, since there is always 
a great deal of imitation in the arts, we soon 
had young painters with perfectly good sight 
looking at landscapes or at their models with 
their eyes half closed and a little asquint, 
until what they saw looked to them like one 
of their favorite master's pictures. 

Further, the Impressionist movement led to 
a busy study of the atmosphere, convention- 
ally supposed to be invisible, but seldom 
really completely so, and of what were called 
values; that is, the relation of light and dark 
between the various objects depicted, on the 
correctness of which relation truth of effect 
largely depends. This, though very difficult 
in full out-door light with the various colors 
brilliantly visible, was comparatively easy in 



28 



gloomy rooms where the absence of light re- 
duced all colors to masses of brown or grey of 
varying depth. Whistler's portrait of Sara- 
sate, a masterpiece in its way, would look like 
a study in monochrome if hung beside a por- 
trait of Holbein; and the little bouquets of 
color with which he sometimes decorates his 
female sitters, exquisite as the best of them 
are, have the character of enamel, of mosaic, 
of jewelry: never of primitive nature. His 
disciples could paint dark interiors, or figures 
placed apparently in coal cellars, with admir- 
able truth and delicacy of values whilst they 
were still helplessly unable to represent a 
green tree or a blue sky, much less paint an 
interior with the light and local color as clear 
as they are in the works of Peter de Hooghe. 
Naturally the public eye, with its utilitarian 
familiarity with local color, and its Philistine 
insensibility to values and atmosphere, did not 
at first see what the Impressionists were driv- 
ing at, and dismissed them as mere perverse, 
notoriety-hunting cranks. 



29 



Here, then, you had a movement wholly 
beneficial and progressive, and in no sense 
insane or decadent; Nevertheless it led to the 
public exhibition of daubs which even the 
authors themselves would never have pre- 
sumed to offer for exhibition before; it be- 
trayed aberrations of vision in painters who, 
on the old academic lines, would have hidden 
their defects by drawing objects (teeth for in- 
stance) as they knew them to exist, and not 
as they saw them; it set clear-sighted students 
practising optical distortion, so as to see 
things myopically and astigmatically ; and it 
substituted canvasses which looked like en- 
largements of under-exposed photographs for 
the familiar portraits of masters of the hounds 
in cheerfully unmistakable pink coats, 
mounted on bright chestnut horses. All of 
which, and much else, to a man who looked 
on without any sense of the deficiencies in con- 
ventional painting, necessarily suggested that 
the Impressionists and their contemporaries 
were much less sane than their fathers. 



30 



WAGNERISM 

Again, my duties as a musical critic com- 
pelled me to ascertain very carefully the exact 
bearings of the controversy which has raged 
round Wagner's music-dramas since the mid- 
dle of the century. When you and I last 
met, we were basking in the sun between the 
acts of Parsifal at Bayreuth ; but experience 
has taught me that an American may appear 
at Bayreuth without being necessarily fonder 
than most men of a technical discussion on 
music. Let me therefore put the case to you 
in a mercifully intelligible way. Music is 
like drawing, in that it can be purely decor- 
ative, or purely dramatic, or anything between 
the two. A draughtsman may be a pattern- 
designer like William Morris, or he may be a 
delineator of life and character, like Ford 
Madox Brown. Or he may come between 
these two extremes, and treat scenes of life and 



character in a decorative way, like Walter 
Crane or Burne- Jones: both of them consum- 
mate pattern-designers, whose subject-pictures 
and illustrations are also fundamentally fig- 
ure-patterns, prettier than Madox Brown's, 
but much less convincingly alive. Do you 
realize that in music we have these same al- 
ternative applications of the art to drama and 
decoration? You can compose a graceful, 
symmetrical sound-pattern that exists solely 
for the sake of its own grace and symmetry. 
Or you can compose music to heighten the 
expression of human emotion; and such music 
will be intensely affecting in the presence of 
that emotion, and utter nonsense apart from 
it. For examples of pure pattern-designing 
in music I should have to go back to the old 
music of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fif- 
teenth centuries, before the operatic movement 
gained the upper hand; but I am afraid my 
assertions that much of this music is very 
beautiful and hugely superior to the stuff our 
music publishers turn out to-day would not be 



32 



believed in America; for when I hinted at 
something of the kind lately in the American 
Musical Courier, and pointed out also the 
beauty of the instruments for which this old 
music was written (viols, virginals, and so 
on), one of your leading musical critics re- 
buked me with an expatiation on the superior- 
ity (meaning apparently the greater loudness) 
of the modern concert grand pianoforte, and 
contemptuously ordered the Middle Ages out 
from the majestic presence of the nineteenth 
century.* You must take my word for it 
that in England alone a long line of com- 
posers, from Henry VIII to Lawes and Pur- 
cell, have left us quantities of instrumental 
music which was neither dramatic music nor 
descriptive music, but was designed to affect 
the hearer solely by its beauty of sound and 
grace and ingenuity of pattern. This is the 
art which Wagner called absolute music. It 



* Perhaps by this time, however, Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch has 
educated America in this matter, as he educated London and 
educated me. 



33 



is represented to-day by the formal sonata and 
symphony; and we are coming back to it in 
something like its old integrity by a post- 
Wagnerian reaction led by that greatly gifted 
absolute musician and hopelessly commonplace 
and tedious homilist, Johannes Brahms. 

To understand the present muddle, you 
must know that modern dramatic music did 
not appear as an independent branch of mu- 
sical art, but as an adulteration of decorative 
music. The first modern dramatic composers 
accepted as binding on them the rules of good 
pattern-designing in sound; and this absurd- 
ity was made to appear practicable by the 
fact that Mozart had such an extraordinary 
command of his art that his operas contain 
numbers which, though they seem to follow 
the dramatic play of emotion and character 
without reference to any other consideration 
whatever, are seen, on examining them from 
the point of view of the absolute musician, to 
be perfectly symmetrical sound-patterns. But 
these tours deforce were no real justification 



34 



for imposing the laws of pattern-designing on 
other dramatic musicians; and even Mozart 
himself broke away from them in all direc- 
tions, and was violently attacked by his con- 
temporaries for doing so, the accusations lev- 
elled at him (absence of melody, illegitimate 
and discordant harmonic progressions, and 
monstrous abuse of the orchestra) being 
exactly those with which the opponents of 
Wagner so often pester ourselves. Wagner, 
whose leading lay characteristic was his enor- 
mous common-sense, completed the emancipa- 
tion of the dramatic musician from these laws 
of pattern-designing; and we now have 
operas, and very good ones too, written by 
composers like Bruneau, who are not musi- 
cians in the old sense at all: that is, they are 
not pattern-designers ; they do not compose 
music apart from drama ; and when they have 
to furnish their operas with dances, instru- 
mental intermezzos or the like, they either 
take themes from the dramatic part of their 
operas and rhapsodize on them, or else they 



turn out some perfectly simple song or dance 
tune, at the cheapness of which Haydn would 
have laughed, and give it an air of momen- 
tousness by orchestral and harmonic fineries. 
If I add now that music in the academic, 
professorial, Conservative, respectable sense 
always means decorative music, and that 
students are taught that the laws of pattern- 
designing are binding on all musicians, and 
that violations of them are absolutely 
" wrong " ; and if I mention incidentally that 
these laws are themselves confused by the sur- 
vivals from a still older tradition based on the 
Church art, technically very highly special- 
ized, of writing perfectly smooth and beautiful 
vocal harmony for unaccompanied voices, 
worthy to be sung by angelic doctors round 
the throne of God (this was Palestrina's art), 
you will understand why all the professional 
musicians who could not see beyond the 
routine they were taught, and all the men and 
women (and there are many of them) who 
have little or no sense of drama, but a very 



36 



keen sense of beauty of sound and prettiness 
of pattern in music, regarded Wagner as a 
madman who was reducing music to chaos, 
perversely introducing ugly and brutal sounds 
into a region where beauty and grace had 
reigned alone, and substituting an incoherent, 
aimless, formless, endless meandering for the 
old familiar symmetrical tunes like Pop Goes 
the Weasel, in which the second and third 
lines repeat, or nearly repeat, the pattern of 
the first and second ; so that any one can 
remember and treasure them like nursery 
rhymes. It was the unprofessional, fe unmu- 
sical " public which caught the dramatic clue, 
and saw order and power, strength and san- 
ity, in the supposed Wagner chaos; and now, 
his battle being won and over won, the pro- 
fessors, to avert the ridicule of their pupils, 
are compelled to explain (quite truly) that 
Wagner's technical procedure in music is 
almost pedantically logical and grammatical; 
that the Lohengrin and Tristan preludes are 
masterpieces of the form proper to their aim ; 



37 



and that his disregard of w false relations," 
and his free use of the most extreme discords 
without " preparation," are straight and sen- 
sible instances of that natural development of 
harmony which has proceeded continuously 
from the days when common six-four chords 
were considered w wrong," and such free use 
of unprepared dominant sevenths and minor 
ninths as had become common in Mozart's 
time would have seemed the maddest 
cacophony.* 

The dramatic development also touched 
purely instrumental music. Liszt tried hard 

* As I spent the first twenty years of my life in Ireland I am, 
for the purposes of this survey of musical art, at least a century 
and a half old. I can remember the sensation given by the 
opening chord of Beethoven's youthful Prometheus overture. 
It sounded strangely strong and momentous, because the use of 
the third inversion of the chord of the dominant seventh with- 
out preparation was unexpected in those days. As to exploding 
undiminished chords of the ninth and thirteenth on the unsus- 
pecting ear in the same way (everybody does it nowadays) , one 
might as well have sat down on the keyboard and called it 
music. The very name of the thirteenth was inconceivable : a 
discreetly prepared and resolved suspension of "four to three " 
was the only form in which that discord was known. I can re- 
member, too, the indignation with which Macfarren, after cor- 
recting his pupils for unintentional consecutive fifths all his life, 



38 



to extricate himself from pianoforte ara- 
besques, and become a tone poet like his 



found himself expected to write an analytic program for the 
performance at a Philharmonic concert of an overture by a 
composer (Goetz) who actually wrote consecutive sevenths 
intentionally because he liked them. 

However, I do not insert this note for the sake of my reminis- 
cences, but because, since writing the text above, a composer of 
the first order (Richard Strauss) has become known in London, 
and has been attacked, just as Wagner was, by the very men 
who lived through the huge blunder of anti-Wagnerism. This 
cannot be accounted for by the superstitions of the age of 
decorative music. Every critic nowadays is thoroughly inured 
to descriptive and dramatic music which is not only as indepen- 
dent of the old decorative forms as Strauss's, but a good deal 
more so ; for Strauss lives on the verge of a barcarolle and sel- 
dom resists a nursery tune for long. The hostility to him may 
be partly due to the fact that by his great achievement of rescu- 
ing music from the realm of tights and wigs and stage armor in 
which Wagner, with all his genius, dwelt to the last, and bring- 
ing it into direct contact with modern life, he was enabled in 
his Heldenleben to give an orchestral caricature of his critics 
which comes much closer home than Wagner's medievally dis- 
guised Beckmesser. But Strauss is denounced by men who are 
quite capable of laughing at themselves, who are sincere advo- 
cates of modern realism in other arts, and who are sufficiently 
good judges to know, for instance, that the greater popularity 
of Tchaikowsky is like the popularity of Rossini nearly a cen- 
tury ago ; that is, the vogue of a musical Byron, who, though 
very pleasant in his lighter vein, very strenuous in his energetic 
vein, and at least grandiose in his sublime vein, never attains, 
or desires to attain, the elevation at which the great modern 
musicians from Bach to Strauss maintain themselves. Anti- 
Straussism is therefore accounted for neither by the old anti- 



39 



friend Wagner. He wanted his symphonic 
poems to express emotions and their develop- 



Wagnerian confusion nor by the petulance of the critic who is 
beaten by his job. 

I conclude that the disagreeable effect which an unaccus- 
tomed discord produces on people who cannot divine its resolu- 
tion is to blame for most of the nonsense now written about 
Strauss. Strauss's technical procedure involves a profusion of 
such shocks. But the disagreeable effect will not last. There is 
no longer a single discord used by Wagner of which the resolu- 
tion is not already as much a platitude as the resolution of the 
simple sevenths of Mozart and Meyerbeer. Strauss not only 
goes from discord to discord, leaving the implied resolutions to 
be inferred by people who never heard them before, but actu- 
ally makes a feature of unresolved discords, just as Wagner 
made a feature of unprepared ones. Men who were reconciled 
quite late in life to compositions beginning with dominant 
thirteenths fortissimo, find themselves disquieted now by 
compositions ending with unresolved tonic sevenths. 

I think this phase of protest will soon pass. I think so be- 
cause I find myself able to follow Strauss's harmonic procedure ; 
to divine the destination of his most discordant passing phrases 
(it is too late now to talk of mere " passing notes ") ; and to 
tolerate his most offhand ellipses and most unceremonious omis- 
sions of final concords with enjoyment, though my musical en- 
dowment is none of the acutest. In twenty years the com- 
plaints about his music will be as unintelligible as the similar 
complaints about Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner in 
the past. 

I must apologize for the technical jargon 1 have had to use in 
this note. Probably it is all obsolete by this time ; but I know 
nothing newer. Stainer would have understood it thirty years 
ago. If nobody understands it to-day, my knowledge will seem 
all the more profound. 



40 



ment. And he defined the emotion by con- 
necting it with some known story, poem, or 
even picture: Mazeppa, Victor Hugo's Les 
Preludes, Kaulbach's Die Hunnenschlacht, or 
the like. But the moment you try to make 
an instrumental composition follow a story, 
you are forced to abandon the decorative 
pattern forms, since all patterns consist of 
some form which is repeated over and over 
again, and which generally consists in itself of 
a repetition of two similar halves. For exam- 
ple, if you take a playing-card (say the five of 
diamonds) as a simple example of a pattern, 
you find not only that the diamond figure is 
repeated five times, but that each side of each 
pip is a reversed duplicate of the other. 
Now, the established form for a symphony is 
essentially a pattern form involving just such 
symmetrical repetitions; and, since a story 
does not repeat itself, but pursues a continu- 
ous chain of fresh incident and correspond- 
ingly varied emotions Liszt, had either to find 
a new musical form for his musical poems, or 



41 



else face the intolerable anomalies and absurd- 
ities which spoil the many attempts made by 
Mendelssohn, Raff and others, to handcuff the 
old form to the new matter. Consequently he 
invented the symphonic poem, a perfectly 
simple and fitting common-sense form for his 
purpose, and one which makes Les Preludes 
much plainer sailing for the ordinary hearer 
than Mendelssohn's Melusine overture or 
Raffs Lenore or Im Walde symphonies, in 
both of which the formal repetitions would 
stamp Raff as a madman if we did not know 
that they were mere superstitions, which he 
had not the strength of mind to shake off as 
Lizst did. But still, to the people who would 
not read Liszt's explanations and cared no- 
thing for his purpose, who had no taste for 
symphonic poetry, and consequently insisted 
on judging the symphonic poems as sound- 
patterns, Liszt must needs appear, like Wag- 
ner, a perverse egotist with something funda- 
mentally disordered in his intellect: in short, 
a lunatic. 



42 



The sequel was the same as in the Impres- 
sionist movement. Wagner, Berlioz, and 
Liszt, in securing tolerance for their own 
works, secured it for what sounded to many 
people absurd; and this tolerance necessarily 
extended to a great deal of stuff which was 
really absurd, but which the secretly-bewil- 
dered critics dared not denounce, lest it, too, 
should turn out to be great, like the music of 
Wagner, over which they had made the most 
ludicrous exhibition of their incompetence. 
Even at such stupidly conservative concerts as 
those of the London Philharmonic Society I 
have seen ultra-modern composers, supposed 
to be representatives of the Wagnerian move- 
ment, conducting pretentious rubbish in no 
essential superior to Jullien's British Army 
Quadrilles. And then, of course, there are 
the young imitators, who are corrupted by 
the desire to make their harmonies sound like 
those of the masters whose purposes and prin- 
ciples of work they are too young to under- 
stand, and who fall between the old forms and 



43 



the new into simple incoherence. 

Here, again, you see, you have a progress- 
ive, intelligent, wholesome, and thoroughly 
sane movement in art, producing plenty of 
evidence to prove the case of any clever man 
who does not understand music, but who has 
a theory which involves the proposition that 
all the leaders of the art movements of our 
time are degenerate and, consequently, 
retrogressive lunatics. 



44 



IBSENISM 

There is no need for me to go at any great 
length into the grounds on which any de- 
velopment in our moral views must at first 
appear insane and blasphemous to people who 
are satisfied, or more than satisfied, with the 
current morality. Perhaps you remember the 
opening chapters of my Quintessence of Ibsen- 
ism, in which I shewed why the London press, 
now abjectly polite to Ibsen, received him four 
years ago with a shriek of horror. Every 
step in morals is made by challenging the 
validity of the existing conception of perfect 
propriety of conduct; and when a man does 
that, he must look out for a very different 
reception from the painter who has ventured 
to paint a shadow brilliant lilac, or the com- 
poser who ends his symphony with an unre- 
solved discord. Heterodoxy in art is at 
worst rated as eccentricity or folly: hetero- 



45 



doxy in morals is at once rated as scoundrel- 
ism, and, what is worse, propagandist scoun- 
drelism, which must, if successful, undermine 
society and bring us back to barbarism after a 
period of decadence like that which brought 
imperial Rome to its downfall. Your func- 
tion as a philosophic Anarchist in American 
society is to combat the attempts that are con- 
stantly being made to arrest development by 
using the force of the State to suppress all de- 
partures from what the majority consider to 
be " right " in conduct or overt opinion. I 
dare say you find the modern democratic 
voter a very troublesome person, chicken- 
heartedly diffident as to the value of his opin- 
ions on the technics of art or science, about 
which he may learn all that there is to be 
known, but cocksure about right and wrong 
in morals, politics, and religion, about which 
he can at best only guess at the depth and 
danger of his ignorance. Happily, this cock- 
sureness is not confined to the Conservatives. 
Shelley is as cocksure as the dons who ex- 



46 



pelled him from Oxford. It is true that the 
revolutionist of twenty-five, who sees nothing 
for it but a clean sweep of all our institutions, 
finds himself, at forty, accepting and even 
clinging to them on condition of a few re- 
forms to bring them up to date. But he does 
not wait patiently for this reconciliation. He 
expresses his (or her) early dissatisfaction 
with the wisdom of his elders loudly and irre- 
verently, and formulates his heresy as a faith. 
He demands the abolition of marriage, of the 
State, of the Church ; he preaches the divinity 
of love and the heroism of the man who be- 
lieves in himself and dares do the thing he 
wills; he contemns the slavery to duty and 
discipline which has left so many soured old 
people with nothing but envious regrets for a 
virtuous youth. He recognizes his gospel in 
such utterances as that quoted by Nordau 
from Brandes: "To obey one's senses is to 
have character. He who allows himself to be 
guided by his passions has individuality." 
For my part, I am not at all afraid of this 



47 



doctrine, either in Brandes's form or in the 
older form: " He that is unjust, let him be 
unjust still; and he which is filthy, let him be 
filthy still; and he that is righteous, let him 
be righteous still; and he that is holy, let 
him be holy still. " But Nordau expresses his 
horror of Brandes with all the epithets he can 
command; "debauchery, dissoluteness, de- 
pravity disguised as modernity, bestial in- 
stincts, maitre de plaisir, egomaniacal An- 
archist," and such sentences as the following: 

It is comprehensible that an educator who turns the 
school-room into a tavern and a brothel should have 
success and a crowd of followers. He certainly runs 
the risk of being slain by the parents if they come to 
know what he is teaching their children ; but the pu- 
pils will hardly complain, and will be eager to attend 
the lessons of so agreeable a teacher. This is the ex- 
planation of the influence Brandes gained over the 
youth of his country, such as his writings, with their 
emptiness of thought and unending tattle, would cer- 
tainly never have procured for him. 

To appreciate this spluttering, you must 
know that it is immediately followed by an at- 
tack on Ibsen for the weakness of a obsession 



48 



by the doctrine of original sin." Yet what 
would the passage I have just quoted be with- 
out the doctrine of original sin as a postulate? 
If " the heart of man is deceitful above all 
things, and desperately wicked," then, truly, 
the man who allows himself to be guided by 
his passions must needs be a scoundrel; and 
his teacher might well be slain by his parents. 
But how if the youth thrown helpless on his 
passions found that honesty, that self-respect, 
that hatred of cruelty and injustice, that the . 
desire for soundness and health and efficiency, 
were master passions: nay, that their excess is 
so dangerous to youth that it is part of the 
wisdom of age to say to the young: " Be not 
righteous overmuch : why shouldst thou de- 
stroy thyself? " I am sure, my dear Tucker, 
your friends have paraphrased that in vernac- 
ular American often enough in remonstrating 
with you for your Anarchism, which defies 
not only God, but even the wisdom of the 
United States Congress. On the other hand, 
the people who profess to renounce and ab- 



49 



jure their own passions, and ostentatiously 
regulate their conduct by the most convenient 
interpretation of what the Bible means, or, 
worse still, by their ability to find reasons for 
it (as if there were not excellent reasons to be 
found for every conceivable course of conduct, 
from dynamiting and vivisection to martyr- 
dom), seldom need a warning against being 
righteous overmuch, their attention, indeed, 
often needing a rather pressing jog in the 
opposite direction. 

Passion is the steam in the engine of all re- 
ligious and moral systems. In so far as it is 
malevolent, the religions are malevolent too, 
and insist on human sacrifices, on hell, wrath, 
and vengeance. You cannot read Browning's 
Caliban upon Setebos, or, Natural Theology 
on the Island without admitting that all our 
religions have been made as Caliban made 
his, and that the difference between Caliban 
and Prospero is not that Prospero has killed 
passion in himself whilst Caliban has yielded 
to it, but that Prospero is mastered by holier 



50 



passions than Caliban's. Abstract principles 
of conduct break down in practice because 
kindness and truth and justice are not duties 
founded on abstract principles external to 
man, but human passions, which have, in 
their time, conflicted with higher passions as 
well as with lower ones. If a young woman, 
in a mood of strong reaction against the 
preaching of duty and self-sacrifice and the 
rest of it, were to tell me that she was deter- 
mined not to murder her own instincts and 
throw away her life in obedience to a mouth- 
ful of empty phrases, I should say to her: 
" By all means do as you propose. Try how 
wicked you can be: it is precisely the same 
experiment as trying how good you can be. 
At worst you will only find out the sort of 
person you really are. At best you will find 
that your passions, if you really and honestly 
let them all loose impartially, will discipline 
you with a severity which your conventional 
friends, abandoning themselves to the me- 
chanical routine of fashion, could not stand 



51 



for a day." As a matter of fact, we have 
seen over and over again this comedy of the 
" emancipated " young enthusiast flinging 
duty and religion, convention and parental 
authority, to the winds, only to find herself, 
for the first time in her life, plunged into 
duties, responsibilities, and sacrifices from 
which she is often glad to retreat, after a few 
years wearing down of her enthusiasm, into 
the comparatively loose life of an ordinary 
respectable woman of fashion. 



52 



WHY LAW IS INDISPENSABLE 

The truth is, laws, religions, creeds, and 
systems of ethics, instead of making society 
better than its best unit, make it worse than 
its average unit, because they are never up to 
date. You will ask me: w Why have them at 
all?" I will tell you. They are made neces- 
sary, though we all secretly detest them, by 
the fact that the number of people who can 
think out a line of conduct for themselves 
even on one point is very small, and the num- 
ber who can afford the time for it still smaller. 
Nobody can afford the time to do it on all 
points. The professional thinker may on oc- 
casion make his own morality and philosophy 
as the cobbler may make his own boots; but 
the ordinary man of business must buy at the 
shop, so to speak, and put up with what he 
finds on sale there, whether it exactly suits 
him or not, because he can neither make a 



53 

morality for himself or do without one. This 
typewriter with which I am writing is the best 
I can get; but it is by no means a perfect in- 
strument; and I have not the smallest doubt 
that in fifty years time authors will wonder 
how men could have put up with so clumsy a 
contrivance. When a better one is invented 
I shall buy it: until then, not being myself an 
inventor, I must make the best of it, just as 
my Protestant and Roman Catholic and Ag- 
nostic friends make the best of their imperfect 
creeds and systems. Oh, Father Tucker, wor- 
shipper of Liberty, where shall we find a land 
where the thinking and moralizing can be 
done without division of labor? 

Besides, what have deep thinking and mor- 
alizing to do with the most necessary and 
least questionable side of law? Just consider 
how much we need law in matters which have 
absolutely no moral bearing at all. Is there 
anything more aggravating than to be told, 
when you are socially promoted, and are not 
quite sure how to behave yourself in the cir- 



54 



cles you enter ibr the first time, that good 
manners are merely a matter of good sense, 
and that rank is but the guinea's stamp: the 
man's the gowd for a' that? Imagine taking 
the field with an army which knew nothing 
except that the soldier's duty is to defend his 
country bravely, and think, not of his own 
safety, nor of home and beauty, but of Eng- 
land ! Or of leaving the traffic of Piccadilly 
or Broadway to proceed on the understanding 
that every driver should keep to that side of 
the road which seemed to him to promote the 
greatest happiness of the greatest number. 
Or of stage-managing Hamlet by assuring the 
Ghost that whether he entered from the right 
or the left could make no difference to the 
greatness of Shakespear's play, and that all" 
he need concern himself about was holding 
the mirror up to nature! Law is never so 
necessary as when it has no ethical signifi- 
cance whatever, and is pure law for the sake 
of law. The law that compels me to keep to 
the left when driving along Oxford Street is 



55 



ethically senseless, as is shewn by the fact that 
keeping to the right answers equally well in 
Paris; and it certainly destroys my freedom to 
choose my side; but by enabling me to count 
on everyone else keeping to the left also, thus 
making traffic possible and safe, it enlarges 
my life and sets my mind free for nobler is- 
sues. Most laws, in short, are not the expres- 
sion of the ethical verdicts of the community, 
but pure etiquette and nothing else. What 
they express is the fact that over most of the 
field of social life there are wide limits within 
which it does not matter what people do, 
though it matters enormously whether under 
given circumstances you can depend on their 
all doing the same thing. The wasp, who can 
be depended on absolutely to sting you if you 
squeeze him, is less of a nuisance than the 
man who tries to do business with you not ac- 
cording to the customs of business, but ac- 
cording to the Sermon on the Mount, or than 
the lady who dines with you and refuses, on 
republican and dietetic principles, to allow 



56 



precedence to a duchess or to partake of food 
which contains uric acid. The ordinary man 
cannot get through the world without being 
told what to do at every turn, and basing 
such calculations as he is capable of on the 
assumption that everyone else will calculate on 
the same assumptions. Even your man of 
genius accepts a hundred rules for every one 
he challenges; and you may lodge in the 
same house with an Anarchist for ten years 
without noticing anything exceptional about 
him. Martin Luther, the priest, horrified the 
greater half of Christendom by marrying a 
nun, yet was a submissive conformist in count- 
less ways, living orderly as a husband and 
father, wearing what his bootmaker and 
tailor made for him, and dwelling in what 
the builder built for him, although he would 
have died rather than take his Church from 
the Pope. And when he got a Church made 
by himself to his liking, generations of men 
calling themselves Lutherans took that 
Church from him just as unquestioningly as 



57 



he took the fashion of his clothes from his 
tailor. As the race evolves, many a conven- 
tion which recommends itself by its obvious 
utility to everyone passes into an automatic 
habit, like breathing. Doubtless also an im- 
provement in our nerves and judgment may 
enlarge the list of emergencies which indi- 
viduals may be trusted to deal with on the 
spur of the moment without reference to regu- 
lations; but a ready-made code of conduct for 
general use will always be needed as a matter 
of overwhelming convenience by all members 
of communities. 

The continual danger to liberty created by 
law arises, not from the encroachments of 
Governments, which are always regarded with 
suspicion, but from the immense utility and 
consequent popularity of law, and the terrify- 
ing danger and obvious inconvenience of an- 
archy; so that even pirates appoint and obey 
a captain. Law soon acquires such a good 
character that people will believe no evil of 
it; and at this point it becomes possible for 



58 

priests and rulers to commit the most perni- 
cious crimes in the name of law and order. 
Creeds and laws come to be regarded as ap- 
plications to human conduct of eternal and 
immutable principles of good and evil; and 
breakers of the law are abhorred as sacrile- 
gious scoundrels to whom nothing is sacred. 
Now this, I need not tell you, is a very seri- 
ous error. No law is so independent of cir- 
cumstances that the time never comes for 
breaking it, changing it, scrapping it as obso- 
lete, and even making its observance a crime. 
In a developing civilization nothing can make 
laws tolerable unless their changes and modi- 
fications are kept as closely as possible on the 
heels of the changes and modifications in so- 
cial conditions which development involves. 
Also there is a bad side to the very conveni- 
ence of law. It deadens the conscience of in- 
dividuals by relieving them of the moral re- 
sponsibility of their own actions. When this 
relief is made as complete as possible, it re- 
duces a man to a condition in which his very 



59 



virtues are contemptible. Military discipline, 
for example, aims at destroying the individ- 
uality and initiative of the soldier whilst 
increasing his mechanical efficiency, until he 
is simply a weapon with the power of hearing 
and obeying orders. In him you have legal- 
ity, duty, obedience, self-denial, submission to 
external authority, carried as far as it can be 
carried; and the result is that in England, 
where military service is voluntary, the com- 
mon soldier is less respected than any other 
serviceable worker in the community. The 
police constable is a free civilian who has to 
use his own judgment and act on his own re- 
sponsibility in innumerable petty emergencies, 
and is by comparison a popular and esteemed 
citizen. The Roman Catholic peasant who 
consults his parish priest instead of his con- 
science, and submits wholly to the authority 
of his Church, is mastered and governed 
either by statesmen and cardinals who despise 
his superstition, or by Protestants who are at 
least allowed to persuade themselves that they 



60 



have arrived at their religious opinions 
through the exercise of their private judg- 
ment. The moral evolution of the social in- 
dividual is from submission and obedience as 
economizers of effort and responsibility, and 
safeguards against panic and incontinence, to 
wilfulness and self-assertion made safe by rea- 
son and self-control, just as plainly as his 
physical growth leads from the perambulator 
and the nurse's apron-string to the power of 
walking alone, and from the tutelage of the 
boy to the responsibility of the man. But it 
is useless for impatient spirits (you and I, for 
instance) to call on people to walk before 
they can stand. Without high gifts of reason 
and self-control: that is, without strong com- 
mon-sense, no man dare yet trust himself out 
of the school of authority. What he does is 
to claim gradual relaxations of the discipline, 
so as to have as much liberty as he thinks is 
good for him, and as much government as he 
thinks he needs to keep him straight. If he 
goes too fast, he soon finds himself asking 



61 



helplessly w What ought I to do?"; and so, 
after running to the doctor, the lawyer, the 
expert, the old friend, and all the other 
quacks for advice, he runs back to the law 
again to save him from all these and from 
himself. The law may be wrong; but at 
least it spares him the responsibility of choos- 
ing, and will either punish those who make 
him look ridiculous by exposing its folly, or, 
when the constitution is too democratic for 
this, at least guarantee that the majority is on 
his side. 

We see this in the history of British- Amer- 
ican Christianity. Man, as the hero of that 
history, starts by accepting as binding on 
him the revelation of God's will as inter- 
preted by the Church. Finding his confi- 
dence, or rather his intellectual laziness, 
grossly abused by the Church, he claims a 
right to exercise his own judgment, which the 
Reformed Church, competing with the Unre- 
formed for clients, grants him on condition 
that he arrive at the same conclusions as it- 



62 



self. Later on he violates this condition in 
certain particulars, and dissents, flying to 
America in the Mayflower from the prison of 
Conformity, but promptly building a new jail, 
suited to the needs of his sect, in his adopted 
country. In all these mutinies he finds excel- 
lent arguments to prove that he is exchanging 
a false authority for the true one, never dar- 
ing even to think of brazenly admitting that 
what he is really doing is substituting his 
own will, bit by bit, for what he calls the will 
of God or the laws of Nature. These argu- 
ments so accustom the world to submit au- 
thority to the test of discussion that he is at 
last emboldened to claim the right to do any- 
thing he can find good arguments for, even to 
the extent of questioning the scientific ac- 
curacy of the Book of Genesis, and the valid- 
ity of the popular conception of God as an 
omniscient, omnipotent, and frightfully jeal- 
ous and vindictive old gentleman sitting on a 
throne above the clouds. This seems a giant 
stride towards emancipation ; but it leaves 



63 



our hero, as Rationalist and Materialist, re- 
garding Reason as a creative dynamic motor, 
independent of and superior to his erring pas- 
sions, at which point it is easy for the 
Churches to suggest that if Reason is to de- 
cide the matter perhaps the conclusion's of an 
Ecumenical Council of learned and skilled 
churchmen might be more trustworthy than 
the first crop of cheap syllogisms excogitated 
by a handful of raw Rationalists in their sects 
of " Freethinkers " and c< Secularists " and 
" Positivists * or w Don't Knowists " 
(Agnostics). 

Yet it was not the churches, but that very 
freethinking philosopher Schopenhauer who 
re-established the old theological doctrine 
that reason is no motive power; that the true 
motive power in the world is will (otherwise 
Life) ; and that the setting-up of reason above 
will is a damnable error. But the theolo- 
gians could not open their arms to Schopen- 
hauer, because he fell into the Rationalist- 
commercial error of valuing life according to 



64 



its profits in individual pleasure, and of course 
came to the idiotic pessimist conclusion that 
life is not worth living, and that the will 
which urges us to live in spite of this is neces- 
sarily a malign torturer, or at least a bad 
hand at business, the desirable end of all 
things being the Nirvana of the stilling of the 
will and the consequent setting of life's sun 
" into the blind cave of eternal night." Fur- 
ther, the will of the theologians was the will 
of a God standing outside man and in au- 
thority above him, whereas the Schopen- 
hauerian will is a purely secular force of na- 
ture, attaining various degrees of organiza- 
tion, here as a jelly-fish, there as a cabbage, 
more complexly as an ape or a tiger, and at- 
taining its highest (and most mischievous) 
form so far in the human being. As to the 
Rationalists, they approved of Schopenhauer's 
secularism and pessimism, but of course could 
not stomach his metaphysical method or his 
dethronement of reason by will. Accord- 
ingly, his turn for popularity did not come 



65 



until after Darwin's, and then mostly through 
the influence of two great artists, Richard 
Wagner and Ibsen, whose Tristan and Em- 
peror Or Galilean shew that Schopenhauer 
was a true pioneer in the forward march of 
the human spirit. We can now, as soon as 
we are strong-minded enough, drop the Nir- 
vana nonsense, the pessimism, the rationalism, 
the supernatural theology, and all the other 
subterfuges to which we cling because we are 
afraid to look life straight in the face and see 
in it, not the fulfilment of a moral law or of 
the deductions of reason, but the satisfaction 
of a passion in us of which we can give no 
account whatever. 

It is natural for man to shrink from the 
terrible responsibility thrown on him by this 
inexorable fact. All his stock excuses vanish 
before it: K The woman tempted me," "The 
serpent tempted me," K I was not myself at 
the time," K I meant well," " My passion got 
the better of my reason," " It was my duty to 
do it," "The Bible says that we should do 



66 



it," " Everybody does it," and so on. 
Nothing is left but the frank avowal: " I did 
it because I am built that way." Every man 
hates to say that. He wants to believe that 
his generous actions are characteristic of him, 
and that his meannesses are aberrations or 
concessions to the force of circumstances. 
Our murderers^ with the assistance of the jail 
chaplain, square accounts with the devil and 
with God, never with themselves. The con- 
vict gives every reason for his having stolen 
something except the reason that he is a thief. 
Cruel people flog their children for their chil- 
dren's good, or offer the information that a 
guinea-pig perspires under atrocious torture 
as an affectionate contribution to science. 
Lynched negroes are riddled by dozens of su- 
perfluous bullets, every one of which is offered 
as the expression of a sense of outraged justice 
and chastity in the scamp and libertine who 
fires it. And such is the desire of men to 
keep one another in countenance that they 
positively demand such excuses from one an- 



67 



other as a matter of public decency. An 
uncle of mine, who made it a rule to offer 
tramps a job when they begged from him, 
naturally very soon became familiar with 
every excuse that human ingenuity can invent 
for not working. But he lost his temper only 
once; and that was with a tramp who frankly 
replied that he was too lazy. This my uncle 
described with disgust as fr cynicism." And 
yet our family arms bear the motto, in Latin, 
K Know thyself." 

As you know, the true trend of this move- 
ment has been mistaken by many of its sup- 
porters as well as by its opponents. The in- 
grained habit of thinking of the propensities 
of which we are ashamed as w our passions," 
and our shame of them and our propensities 
to noble conduct as a negative and inhibitory 
department called generally our conscience, 
leads us to conclude that to accept the 
guidance of our passions is to plunge reck- 
lessly into the insupportable tedium of what 
is called a life of pleasure. Reactionists 



68 

against the almost equally insupportable 
slavery of what is called a life of duty are 
nevertheless willing to venture on these terms. 
The revolted daughter, exasperated at being 
systematically lied to by her parents on every 
subject of vital importance to an eager and 
intensely curious young student of life, allies 
herself with really vicious people and with 
humorists who like to shock the pious with 
gay paradoxes, in claiming an impossible 
license in personal conduct. No great harm 
is done beyond the inevitable and temporary 
excesses produced by all reactions; for, as I 
have said, the would-be wicked ones find, 
when they come to the point, that the indis- 
pensable qualification for a wicked life is not 
freedom but wickedness. But the misunder- 
standing supports the clamor of the opponents 
of the newest opinions, who naturally shriek 
as Nordau shrieks in the passages about 
Brandes, quoted above. Thus you have here 
again a movement which is thoroughly bene- 
ficial and progressive presenting a hideous 



69 

appearance of moral corruption and decay, 
not only to our old-fashioned religious folk, 
but to our comparatively modern scientific 
Rationalists as well. And here again, be- 
cause the press and the gossips have found 
out that this apparent corruption and decay 
is considered the right thing in some influen- 
tial quarters, and must be spoken of with re- 
spect, and patronized and published and sold 
and read, we have a certain number of pitiful 
imitators taking advantage of their tolerance 
to bring out really silly and rotten stuff, 
which the reviewers are afraid to expose, lest 
it, too, should turn out to be the correct 
thing. 



70 



NORDAITS BOOK 

After this long preamble, you will have no 
difficulty in understanding the sort of book 
Nordau has written. Imagine a huge volume, 
stuffed with the most slashing of the criticisms 
which were hurled at the Impressionists, the 
Tone Poets, and the philosophers and drama- 
tists of the Schopenhauerian revival, before 
these movements had reached the point at 
which it began to require some real courage 
to attack them. Imagine a rehash not only 
of the newspaper criticisms of this period, but 
of all its little parasitic paragraphs of small- 
talk and scandal, from the long-forgotten 
jibes against Oscar Wilde's momentary at- 
tempt to bring knee-breeches into fashion 
years ago, to the latest scurrilities about " the 
New Woman." Imagine the general staleness 
and occasional putrescence of this mess dis- 
guised by a dressing of the terminology in- 



71 



vented by Krafft-Ebing, Lombroso, and all 
the latest specialists in madness and crime, to 
describe the artistic faculties and propensities 
as they operate in the insane. Imagine all 
this done by a man who is a vigorous and ca- 
pable journalist, shrewd enough to see that 
there is a good opening for a big reactionary 
book as a relief to the Wagner and Ibsen 
booms, bold enough to let himself go without 
respect to persons or reputations, lucky 
enough to be a stronger, clearer-headed man 
than ninety-nine out of a hundred of his 
critics, besides having a keener interest in 
science: a born theorist, reasoner, and busy- 
body; therefore able, without insight, or even 
any very remarkable intensive industry (he is, 
like most Germans, extensively industrious to 
an appalling degree), to produce a book 
which has made a very considerable impres- 
sion on the artistic ignorance of Europe and 
America. For he says a thing as if he meant 
it; he holds superficial ideas obstinately, and 
sees them clearly; and his mind works so im- 



72 



petuously that it is a pleasure to watch it — 
for a while. All the same, he is the dupe of 
a theory which would hardly impose on one of 
those gamblers who have a system or martin- 
gale founded on a solid rock of algebra, by 
which they can infallibly break the bank at 
Monte Carlo. " Psychiatry " takes the place 
of algebra in Nordau's martingale. 

This theory of his is, at bottom, nothing 
but the familiar delusion of the used-up man 
that the world is going to the dogs. But 
Nordau is too clever to be driven back on 
ready-made mistakes: he makes them for 
himself in his own way. He appeals to the 
prodigious extension of the quantity of busi- 
ness a single man can transact through the 
modern machinery of social intercourse : the 
railway, the telegraph and telephone, the post, 
and so forth. He gives appalling statistics of 
the increase of railway mileage and shipping, 
of the number of letters written per head of 
the population, of the newspapers which tell . 
us things (mostly lies) of which we used to 



73 



know nothing.* " In the last fifty years," he 
says, " the population of Europe has not 
doubled, whereas the sum of its labors has 
increased tenfold: in part, even fiftyfold. 
Every civilized man furnishes, at the present 
time, from five to twenty-five times as much 
work as was demanded of him half a century 
ago."f Then follow more statistics of " the 
constant increase of crime, madness, and sui- 
cide," of increases in the mortality from dis- 



* Perhaps I had better remark in passing that, unless it were 
true — which it is not — that the length of the modern penny 
letter or halfpenny post-card is the same as that of the eigh- 
teenth-century letter, and that the number of persons who 
know how to read and write has not increased, there is no rea- 
son whatever to draw Nordau's conclusion from the postal 
statistics. 

t Here again we have a statement which means nothing 
unless it be compared with statistics as to the multiplication of 
the civilized man's power of production by machinery, which in 
some industries has multiplied a single man's power by hun- 
dreds and in others by thousands. As to crimes and disease, 
Nordau should state whether he counts convictions under mod- 
ern laws — for offences against the Joint Stock Company Acts, for 
instance — as proving that we have degenerated since those Acts 
were passed, and whether he regards the invention of new 
names for a dozen varieties of fever which were formerly 
counted as one single disease as an evidence of decaying health 
in the face of the increasing duration of life. 



74 



eases of the nerves and heart, of increased 
consumption of stimulants, of new nervous 
diseases like " railway spine and railway 
brain," with the general moral that we are all 
suffering from exhaustion, and that symptoms 
of degeneracy are visible in all directions, 
culminating at various points in such hysteri- 
cal horrors as Wagner's music, Ibsen's dra- 
mas, Manet's pictures, Tolstoy's novels, Whit- 
man's poetry, Dr. Jaeger's woollen clothing, 
vegetarianism, scepticism as to vivisection and 
vaccination, Anarchism and humanitarianism, 
and, in short, everything that Dr. Nordau 
does not happen to approve of. 

You will at once see that such a case, if 
well got up and argued, is worth hearing, 
even though its advocate has no chance of a 
verdict, because it is sure to bring out a cer- 
tain number of interesting and important 
facts. It is, I take it, quite true that with 
our railways and our postal services many of 
us are for the moment very like a pedestrian 
converted to bicycling, who, instead of using 



75 

his machine to go twenty miles with less labor 
than he used to walk seven, proceeds to do a 
hundred miles instead, with the result tl at the 
''labor-saving" contrivance acts as a mnans 
of working its user to exhaustion. It is- also 
true that under our existing industrial s /stem 
machinery in industrial processes is rega % ded 
solely as a means of extracting a larger ] to- 
duct from the unremitted toil of the actual 
wage-worker. And I do not think any j er- 
son who is in touch with the artistic profes- 
sions will deny that they are recruited largely 
by persons who become actors, or painters, or 
journalists and authors because they are in ca- 
pable of steady work and regular habits, o * 
that the attraction which the patrons of thr 
stage, music, and literature find in their fa 
vorite arts has often little or nothing to do 
with the need which nerves great artists to the 
heavy travail of creation. The claim of ai t 
to our respect must stand or fall with the 
validity of its pretension to cultivate and n ■ 
fine our senses and faculties until seeing, 



76 



hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting become 
highly conscious and critical acts with us, 
protesting vehemently against ugliness, noise, 
discordant speech, frowzy clothing, and re- 
breathed air, and taking keen interest and 
pleasure in beauty, in music, and in nature, 
besides making us insist, as necessary for com- 
fort and decency, on clean, wholesome, hand- 
some fabrics to wear, and utensils of fine ma- 
terial and elegant workmanship to handle. 
Further, art should refine our sense of char- 
acter and conduct, of justice and sympathy, 
greatly heightening our self-knowledge, self- 
control, precision of action, and considerate- 
ness, and making us intolerant of baseness, 
cruelty, injustice, and intellectual superficiality 
or vulgarity. The worthy artist or craftsman 
is he who serves the physical and moral senses 
by feeding them with pictures, musical com- 
positions, pleasant houses and gardens, good 
clothes and fine implements, poems, fictions, 
essays, and dramas which call the heightened 
senses and ennobled faculties into pleasurable 



77 



activity. The great artist is he who goes a 
step beyond the demand, and, by supplying 
works of a higher beauty and a higher inter- 
est than have yet been perceived, succeeds, 
after a brief struggle with its strangeness, in 
adding this fresh extension of sense to the 
heritage of the race. This is why we value 
art: this is why we feel that the iconoclast 
and the Philistine are attacking something 
made holier, by solid usefulness, than their 
own theories of purity and practicality : this 
is why art has won the privileges of religion ; 
so that London shopkeepers who would 
fiercely resent a compulsory church rate, who 
do not know Yankee Doodle from Luther's 
hymn, and who are more interested in photo- 
graphs of the latest celebrities than in the Ve- 
lasquez portraits in the National Gallery, 
tamely allow the London County Council to 
spend their money on bands, on municipal 
art inspectors, and on plaster casts from the 
antique. 

But the business of responding to the de- 



78 



mand for the gratification of the senses has 
many grades. The confectioner who makes 
unwholesome sweets, the bullfighter, the 
women whose advertisements in the American 
papers are so astounding to English people, 
are examples ready to hand to shew what the 
art and trade of pleasing may be, not at its 
lowest, but at the lowest that we can speak of 
without intolerable shame. We have drama- 
tists who write their lines in such a way as to 
enable low comedians of a certain class to give 
them an indecorous turn; we have painters 
who aim no higher than Giulio Romano did 
when he decorated the Palazzo Te in Mantua; 
we have poets who have nothing to versify but 
the commonplaces of amorous infatuation ; 
and, worse than all the rest put together, we 
have journalists who openly profess that it is 
their duty to "reflect " what they believe to 
be the ignorance and prejudice of their 
readers, instead of leading and enlightening 
them to the best of their ability : an excuse 
for cowardice and time-serving which is also 



79 



becoming well worn in political circles as 
" the duty of a democratic statesman." In 
short, the artist can be a prostitute, a pander, 
and a flatterer more easily, as far as external 
pressure goes, than a faithful servant of the 
community, much less the founder of a school 
or the father of a church. Even an artist 
who is doing the best he can may be doing a 
very low class of work : for instance, many 
performers at the rougher music-halls, who get 
their living by singing coarse songs in the 
rowdiest possible way, do so to the utmost of 
their ability in that direction in the most con- 
scientious spirit of earning their money hon- 
estly and being a credit to their profession. 
And the exaltation of the greatest artists is 
not continuous: you cannot defend every line 
of Shakespear or every stroke of Titian. 
Since the artist is a man and his patron a 
man, all human moods and grades of develop- 
ment are reflected in art; consequently the 
iconoclast's or the Philistine's indictments of 
art have as many counts as the misanthrope's 



80 



indictment of humanity. And this is the 
Achilles heel of art at which Nordau has 
struck. He has piled the iconoclast on the 
Philistine, the Philistine on the misanthrope, 
in order to make out his case. 



81 



ECHOLALIA 

Let me describe to you one or two of his 
artifices as a special pleader making the most 
of the eddies at the sides of the stream of pro- 
gress. Take as a first specimen the old and 
effective trick of pointing out, as " stigmata 
of degeneration " in the person he is abusing, 
features which are common to the whole hu- 
man race. The drawing-room palmist aston- 
ishes ladies by telling them " secrets " about 
themselves which are nothing but the inevit- 
able experiences of ninety-nine people out of 
every hundred, though each individual is 
vain enough to suppose that they are peculiar 
to herself. Nordau turns the trick inside out 
by trusting to the fact that people are in the 
habit of assuming that uniformity and sym- 
metry are laws of nature : for example, that 
every normal person's face is precisely symmet- 
rical, that all persons have the same number 



82 

of bones in their bodies, and so on. He 
takes advantage of this popular error to claim 
asymmetry as a stigma of degeneration. As 
a matter of fact, perfect symmetry or uni- 
formity does not exist in nature. My two 
profiles, when photographed, are hardly rec- 
ognizable as belonging to the same person by 
those who do not know me; so that the cam- 
era would prove me an utter degenerate if my 
case were exceptional. Probably, however, 
you would not object to testify that my face is 
as symmetrical as faces are ordinarily made. 
Another unfailing trick is the common one of 
having two names for the same thing, one 
abusive, the other complimentary, for use ac- 
cording to circumstances. You know how it 
is done : " We trust the Government will be 
firm " in one paper, and " We hope the ob- 
stinate elements in the Cabinet will take 
warning in time " in another. The following 
is a typical specimen of Nordau's use of this 
device. First, let me explain that when a 
man with a turn for rhyming goes mad, he 



83 

repeats rhymes as if he were quoting a rhym- 
ing dictionary. You say " Come " to him, 
and he starts away with " Dumb, plum, sum, 
rum, numb, gum," and so on. This the doc- 
tors call echolalia. Dickens gives a specimen 
of it in Great Expectations, where Mr. Jag- 
gers's Jewish client expresses his rapture of 
admiration for the lawyer by exclaiming: 
"Oh, Jaggerth, Jaggerth, Jaggerth! all 
otherth ith Cag-Maggerth : give me Jag- 
gerth! " There are some well-known verses by 
Swinburne, beginning, " If love were what the 
rose is," which, rhyming and tripping along 
very prettily, express a sentiment without 
making any intelligible statement whatsoever; 
and we have plenty of nonsensically inconse- 
quent nursery rhymes, like Ba, ba, black 
sheep, or Old Daddy long legs, which please 
sane children just as Mr. Swinburne's verses 
please sane adults, simply as funny or pretty 
little word-patterns. People do not write 
such things for the sake of conveying infor- 
mation, but for the sake of amusing and 



84 



pleasing, just as people do not eat strawber- 
ries and cream to nourish their bones and 
muscles, but to enjoy the taste of a toothsome 
dish. A lunatic may plead that he eats kit- 
chen soap and tin tacks on the same ground; 
and, as far as I can see, the lunatic would 
completely shut up Nordau by this argument; 
for Nordau is absurd enough, in the case of 
rhyming, to claim that every rhyme made for 
its own sake, as proved by the fact that it 
does not convey an intelligible statement of 
fact of any kind, convicts the rhymer of echo- 
lalia. He can thus convict any poet whom 
he dislikes of being a degenerate by simply 
picking out a rhyme which exists for its own 
sake, or a pun, or what is called a burden in a 
ballad, and claiming them as symptoms of 
echolalia, supporting this diagnosis by care- 
fully examining the poem for contradictions 
and inconsistencies as to time, place, descrip- 
tion, or the like. It will occur to you proba- 
bly that by this means he must bring out 
Shakespear as the champion instance of poetic 



85 



degeneracy, since Shakespear was an incorri- 
gible punster; delighted in burdens (for in- 
stance, " With hey, ho, the wind and the 
rain," which exactly fulfils all the conditions 
accepted by Nordau as symptomatic of insan- 
ity in Rossetti's case) ; and rhymed for the 
sake of rhyming in quite a childish fashion; 
whilst, as to contradictions and inconsistencies, 
A Midsummer Night's Dream, as to which 
Shakespear never made up his mind whether 
the action covered a week or a single night, is 
only one of a dozen instances of his slips. 
But no : Shakespear, not being a nineteenth- 
century poet, would have spoiled the case for 
modern degeneration by showing that its 
symptoms existed before the telegraph and the 
railway were dreamt of; and besides, Nordau 
likes Shakespear, just as he likes Goethe, and 
holds him up as a model of sanity in contrast 
to the nineteenth-century poets. Thus Wag- 
ner is a degenerate because he made puns; 
and Shakespear, who made worse ones, is a 
great poet. Swinburne, with his w unmean- 



86 



ing " refrains of " Small red leaves in the mill 
water," and " Apples of gold for the King's 
daughter," is a diseased madman; but Shake- 
spear, with his " In spring time, the only 
merry ring time, when birds do sing hey ding 
a ding ding " (if this is not the worst case of 
echolalia in the world, what is echolalia?), is 
a sober master mind, Rossetti, with his 
Blessed Damozel leaning out from the gold 
bar of heaven, weeping though she is in para- 
dise, which is a happy place; describing the 
dead in one line as " dressed in white " and in 
another as " mounting like thin flames "; and 
calculating days and years quite otherwise 
than commercial almanacks do, is that dan- 
gerous and cranky thing, a mystic; whilst 
Goethe (the author of the second part of 
Faust, if you please) is a hard-headed, ac- 
curate, sound, scientific poet. As to the list 
of inconsistencies of which poor Ibsen is con- 
victed, it is too long to be dealt with in de- 
tail. But I assure you I am not doing Nor- 
dau less than justice when I say that if he 



87 

had accused Shakespear of inconsistency on 
the ground that Othello is represented in the 
first act as loving his wife, and in the last as 
strangling her, the demonstration would have 
left you with more respect for his good sense 
than his pages on Ibsen, the folly of which 
goes beyond all patience.* 

When Nordau deals with painting and 
music, he is less irritating, because he errs 
through ignorance, and ignorance, too, of a 
sort that is now perfectly well recognized and 
understood. We all know what the old-fash- 



* Perhaps I had better give one example. Nordau first quotes 
a couple of speeches from An Enemy of the People and The 
Wild Duck: 

Stocemann: I love my native town so well that I had rather 
ruin it than see it flourishing on a lie. All men who live on lies 
must be exterminated like vermin. (An Enemy of the People.) 

Relling: Yes, I said, illusion [lie]. For illusion, you know, is 
the stimulating principle. Rob the average man of his life 
illusion and you rob him of his happiness at the same time. 
(The Wild Duck.) 

Nordau proceeds to comment as follows; 

" Now, what is Ibsen's real opinion? Is a man to strive for 
truth or to swelter in deceit? Is Ibsen with Stockmann or with 
Relling ? Ibsen owes us an answer to these questions or, rather, 
he replies to them affirmatively 7 and negatively with equal ardor 
and equal poetie power." 



88 



ioned critic of literature and science who culti- 
vated his detective logic without ever dreaming 
of cultivating his eyes and ears, can be relied 
upon to say when painters and composers are 
under discussion. Nordau gives himself away 
with laughable punctuality. He celebrates 
"the most glorious period of the Renaissance" 
and "the rosy dawn of the new thought " with 
all the gravity of the older editions of Mur- 
ray's guides to Italy. He tells us that " to 
copy Cimabue and Giotto is comparatively 
easy: to imitate Raphael it is necessary to be 
able to draw and paint to perfection." He 
lumps Fra Angelico with Giotto and Cima- 
bue, as if they represented the same stage in 
the development of technical execution, and 
Pollajuolo with Ghirlandajo. " Here," he 
says, speaking of the great Florentine paint- 
ers, from Giotto to Masaccio, u were paintings 
bad in drawing, faded or smoked, their color- 
ing either originally feeble or impaired by the 
action of centuries, pictures executed with the 
awkwardness of a learner . . . easy of imita- 



89 

tion, since, in painting pictures in the style of 
the early masters, faulty drawing, deficient 
sense of color, and general artistic incapacity ', 
are so many advantages." To make any 
comment on these howlers would be to hit a 
man when he is down. Poor Nordau offers 
them as a demonstration that Ruskin, who 
gave this sort of ignorant nonsense its death- 
blow in England, was a delirious mystic. 
Also that Millais and Holman Hunt, in the 
days of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, strove 
to acquire the qualities of the early Florentine 
masters because the Florentine easel pictures 
were so much easier to imitate than those of 
the apprentices in Raphael's Roman fresco 
factory. 

In music we find Nordau equally content 
with the theories as to how music is composed 
which were current among literary men fifty 
years ago. He tells us of" the severe discip- 
line and fixed rules of the theory of composi- 
tion, which gave a grammar to the musical 
babbling of primeval times, and made of it 



90 

a worthy medium for the expression of the 
emotions of civilized men," and describes 
Wagner as breaking these fixed rules and re- 
belling against this severe discipline because 
he was " an inattentive mystic, abandoned to 
amorphous dreams." This notion that there 
are certain rules, derived from a science of 
counterpoint, by the application of which 
pieces of music can be constructed just as an 
equilateral triangle can be constructed on a 
given straight line by any one who has mas- 
tered Euclid's first proposition, is highly 
characteristic of the generation of blind and 
deaf critics to which Nordau belongs. It 
is evident that if there were fixed rules by 
which Wagner or anyone else could have 
composed good music, there could have been 
no more severe discipline in the work of com- 
position than in the work of arranging a list 
of names in alphabetical order. The severity 
of artistic discipline is produced by the fact 
that in creative art no ready-made rules can 
help you. There is nothing to guide you to 



91 



the right expression for your thought except 
your own sense of beauty and fitness; and, as 
you advance upon those who went before you, 
that sense of beauty and fitness is necessarily 
often in conflict, not with fixed rules, because 
there are no rules, but with precedents, which 
are what Nordau means by fixed rules, as far 
as he knows what he is talking about enough 
to mean anything at all. If Wagner had 
composed the prelude to Das Rheingold with 
a half close at the end of the eighth bar and 
a full close at the end of the sixteenth, he 
would undoubtedly have followed the prece- 
dent of Mozart and other great composers, 
and complied with the requirements of Messrs. 
Hanslick, Nordau and Company. Only, as it 
happened, that was not what he wanted to do. 
His purpose was to produce a tone picture of 
the mighty flood in the depths of the Rhine; 
and, as the poetic imagination does not con- 
ceive the Rhine as stopping at every eight feet 
to take off its hat to Herren Hanslick and 
Nordau, the closes and half closes are omitted, 



92 



and Nordau, huffed at being passed by as if 
he were a person of no consequence, complains 
that the composer is "an inattentive mystic, 
abandoned to amorphous dreams." But, 
even if Wagner's descriptive purpose is left 
out of the question, Nordau's general criticism 
of him is an ignorant one; for the truth is 
that Wagner, like most artists who have great 
intellectual power, was dominated in the tech- 
nical work of his gigantic scores by so strong 
a regard for system, order, logic, symmetry, 
and syntax, that when in the course of time 
his melody and harmony become perfectly 
familiar to us, he will be ranked with Handel 
as a composer whose extreme regularity of 
procedure must make his work appear drily 
mechanical to those who cannot catch its 
dramatic inspiration. If Nordau, having no 
sense of that inspiration, had said: "This fel- 
low, whom you all imagine to be the creator 
of a new heaven and a new earth in music out 
of a chaos of poetic emotion, is really an ar- 
rant pedant and formalist," I should have 



93 



pricked up my ears and listened to him with 
some curiosity, knowing how good a case a 
really keen technical critic could make out for 
that view. As it is, I have only to expose 
him as having picked up a vulgar error under 
the influence of a vulgar literary superstition. 
For the rest, you will hardly need any 
prompting of mine to appreciate the absurdity 
of dismissing as " inattentive " the Paris 
journalist, the Dresden conductor, the designer 
and founder of the Bayreuth enterprise, the 
humorous and practical author of On Con- 
ducting, and the man who scored and stage- 
managed the four evenings of The Niblung's 
Ring. I purposely leave out the composer, 
the poet, the philosopher, the reformer, since 
Nordau cannot be compelled to admit that 
Wagner's eminence in these departments was 
real. Striking them all out accordingly, 
there remain the indisputable, objective facts 
of Wagner's practically professional ability 
and organizing power to put Nordau's diag- 
nosis of Wagner as an amorphous, inattentive 



94 



person out of the question. If Nordau had 
one hundredth part of the truly terrific power 
of attention which Wagner must have main- 
tained all his life almost as easily as a com- 
mon man breathes, he would not now be so 
deplorable an example of the truth of his own 
contention that the power of attention may be 
taken as the measure of mental strength. 

Nordau's trick of calling rhyme echolalia 
when he happens not to like the rhymer is re- 
applied in the case of authorship, which he 
calls graphomania when he happens not to 
like the author. He insists that Wagner, 
who was a voluminous author as well as a 
composer, was a graphomaniac ; and his proof 
is that in his books we find " the restless repe- 
tition of one and the same strain of thought 
. . . Opera and Drama, Judaism in Music, 
Religion and the State, Art and Religion, and 
the Vocation of Opera are nothing more than 
the amplification of single passages in The 
Art- Work of the Future." This is a capital 
example of Nordau's limited power of atten- 



95 

tion. The moment that limited power is con- 
centrated on his theory of degeneration, he 
loses sight of everything else, and drives his 
one borrowed horse into every obstacle on the 
road. To those of us who can attend to more 
than one thing at a time, there is no observa- 
tion more familiar, and more frequently con- 
firmed, than that this growth of pregnant sin- 
gle sentences into whole books which Nordau 
discovers in Wagner, balanced as it always 
is by the contraction of whole boyish chapters 
into single epigrams, is the process by which 
all great writers, speakers, artists, and think- 
ers elaborate their life-work. Let me take a 
writer after Nordau's own heart, a specialist 
in lunacy, one whom he quotes as a trust- 
worthy example of what he calls " the clear, 
mentally sane author, who, feeling himself 
impelled to say something, once for all ex- 
presses himself as distinctly and impressively 
as it is possible for him to do, and has done 
with it " : namely, Dr. Henry Maudsley. Dr. 
Maudsley is a clever and cultivated specialist 



96 



in insanity, who has written several interesting 
books, consisting of repetitions, amplifications, 
and historical illustrations of the same idea, 
which is, if I may put it rather more bluntly 
than the urbane author, nothing less than the 
identification of religious with sexual ecstasy. 
And the upshot of it is the conventional scien- 
tific pessimism, from which Dr. Maudsley 
never gets away; so that his last book repeats 
his first book, instead of leaving it far behind, 
as Wagner's State and Religion leaves his Art 
and Revolution behind. But now that I have 
prepared the way by quoting Dr. Maudsley, 
why should I not ask Herr Nordau himself to 
step before the looking-glass and tell us 
frankly whether, even in the ranks of his 
" psychiatrists " and lunacy doctors, he can 
pick out a crank more hopelessly obsessed 
with one idea than himself? If you want an 
example of echolalia, can you find a more 
shocking one than this gentleman who, when 
you say " mania," immediately begins to gab- 
ble Egomania, Graphomania, Megalomania, 



97 



Onomatomania, Pyromania, Kleptomania, 
Dipsomania, Erotomania, Arithmomania, 
Oniomania, and is started off by the termina- 
tion u phobia " with a string of Agoraphobia, 
Claustrophobia, Rupophobia, Iophobia, Noso- 
phobia, Aichmophobia, Belenophobia, Crem- 
nophobia, and Trichophobia? After which 
he suddenly observes: "This is simply philo- 
logico-medical trifling," a remark which looks 
like returning sanity until he follows it up by 
clasping his temples in the true bedlamite 
manner, and complaining that " psychiatry is 
being stuffed with useless and disturbing 
designations," whereas, if the psychiatrists 
would only listen to him, they would see that 
there is only one phobia and pne mania: 
namely, degeneracy. That is, the philologico- 
medical triflers are not crazy enough for him. 
He is so utterly mad on the subject of degen- 
eration that he finds the symptoms of it in the 
loftiest geniuses as plainly as in the lowest 
jailbirds, the exceptions being himself, Lom- 
broso, Krafft-Ebing, Dr. Maudsley, Goethe, 



98 

Shakespear, and Beethoven. Perhaps he 
would have dwelt on a case so convenient in 
many ways for his theory as Coleridge but 
that it would spoil the connection between 
degeneration and " railway spine." If a 
man's senses are acute, he is degenerate, 
hyperesthesia having been observed in asy- 
lums. If they are dull, he is degenerate, 
anaesthesia being the stigma of the craziness 
which made old women confess to witchcraft. 
If he is particular as to what he wears, he is 
degenerate: silk dressing-gowns and knee- 
breeches are grave symptoms, and woollen 
shirts conclusive. If he is negligent in these 
matters, clearly he is inattentive, and therefore 
degenerate. If he drinks, he is neurotic : if 
he is a vegetarian and teetotaller, let him be 
locked up at once. If he lives an evil life, 
that fact condemns him without further 
words: if on the other hand his conduct is 
irreproachable, he is a wretched " mattoid," 
incapable of the will and courage to realize 
his vicious propensities in action. If he 



99 

writes verse, he is afflicted with echolalia; if 
he writes prose, he is a graphomaniac ; if in 
his books he is tenacious of his ideas, he is 
obsessed; if not, he is " amorphous " and " in- 
attentive." Wagner, as we have seen, con- 
trived to be both obsessed and inattentive, as 
might be expected from one who was "himself 
alone charged with a greater abundance of 
degeneration than all the other degenerates 
put together." And so on and so forth. 

There is, however, one sort of mental weak- 
ness, common among men who take to science, 
as so many people take to art, without the 
necessary brain power, which Nordau, with 
amusing unconsciousness of himself, has 
omitted. I mean the weakness of the man 
who, when his theory works out into a fla- 
grant contradiction of the facts, concludes: 
"So much the worse for the facts: let them be 
altered," instead of: " So much the worse for 
my theory." What in the name of common- 
sense is the value of a theory which identifies 
Ibsen, Wagner, Tolstoy, Ruskin, and Victor 



100 

Hugo with the refuse of our prisons and luna- 
tic asylums? What is to be said of the state 
of mind of an inveterate pamphleteer and 
journalist who, instead of accepting that iden- 
tification as a reductio ad absurdum of the 
theory, desperately sets to work to prove it by 
pointing out that there are numerous resem- 
blances; that they all have heads and bodies, 
appetites, aberrations, whims, weaknesses, 
asymmetrical features, erotic impulses, fallible 
judgments, and the like common properties, 
not merely of all human beings, but all verte- 
brate organisms. Take Nordau's own list: 
" vague and incoherent thought, the tyranny 
of the association of ideas, the presence of 
obsessions, erotic excitability, religious enthu- 
siasm, feebleness of perception, will, memory, 
and judgment, as well as inattention and in- 
stability." Is there a single man capable of 
understanding these terms who will not plead 
guilty to some experience of all of them, espe- 
cially when he is accused vaguely and unscien- 
tifically, without any statement of the subject, 



101 

or the moment, or the circumstances to which 
the accusation refers, or any attempt to fix a 
standard of sanity? I could prove Nordau to 
be an elephant on more evidence than he has 
brought to prove that our greatest men are 
degenerate lunatics. The papers in which 
Swift, having predicted the death of the sham 
prophet Bickerstaff on a certain date, did, 
after that date, immediately prove that he was 
dead, are much more closely and fairly rea- 
soned than any of Nordau's chapters. And 
Swift, though he afterwards died in a mad- 
house, was too sane to be the dupe of his own 
logic. At that rate, where will Nordau die? 
Probably in a highly respectable suburban 
villa. 

Nordau's most likeable point is the freedom 
and boldness with which he expresses himself. 
Speaking of Peladan (of whose works I know 
nothing), he says, whilst holding him up as a 
typical degenerate of the mystical variety : 
" His moral ideal is high and noble. He 
pursues with ardent hatred all that is base 



102 

and vulgar, every form of egoism, falsehood, 
and thirst for pleasure; and his characters are 
thoroughly aristocratic souls, whose thoughts 
are concerned only with the worthiest, if some- 
what exclusively artistic, interests of society. " 
On the other hand, Maeterlinck is a " poor 
devil of an idiot"; Mr. W. D. O'Connor, for 
describing Whitman as " the good grey poet," 
is politely introduced as " an American drivel- 
ler" ; Nietzsche " belongs, body and soul, to 
the flock of the mangy sheep"; Ibsen is " a 
malignant, anti-social simpleton"; and so on. 
Only occasionally is he Pharisaical in his 
tone, as, for instance, when he becomes vir- 
tuously indignant over Wagner's dramas, and 
plays to Mrs. Grundy by exclaiming ironic- 
ally: "How unperverted must wives and 
readers be, when they are in a state of mind 
to witness these pieces without blushing crim- 
son and sinking into the earth for shame! " 
This, to do him justice, is only an exceptional 
lapse: a far more characteristic comment of 
his on Wagner's love-scenes is "The lovers in 



103 

his pieces behave like tom-cats gone mad, roll- 
ing in contortions and convulsions over a root 
of valerian." And he is not always on the 
side of the police, so to speak; for he is as 
careless of the feelings of the " beer-drinking " 
German bourgeoisie as of those of the 
aesthetes. Thus, though on one page he is 
pointing out that Socialism and all other 
forms of discontent with the existing social 
order are " stigmata of degeneration," on the 
next he is talking pure Karl Marx. For ex- 
ample, taking the two sides in their order: 

Ibsen's egomania assumes the form of Anarchism. 
He is in a state of constant revolt against all that ex- 
ists. . . . The psychological roots of his anti- social 
impulses are well known. They are the degenerate's 
incapacity for self-adaptation, and the resultant dis- 
comfort in the midst of circumstances to which, in 
consequence of his organic deficiencies, he cannot 
accommodate himself. " The criminal," says Lom- 
broso, "through his neurotic and impulsive nature, 
and his hatred of the institutions which have punished 
or imprisoned him, is a perpetual latent political rebel, 
who finds in insurrection the means, not only of satis- 
fying his passions, but of even having them counte- 
nanced for the first time by a numerous public." 



104 

Wagner is a declared Anarchist. ... He betrays 
that mental condition which the degenerate shares 
with enlightened reformers, born criminals with the 
martyrs of human progress : namely, deep, devouring 
discontent with existing facts. ... He would like to 
crush "political and criminal civilization,' ' as he calls 
it. 

Now for Nordau speaking for himself: 

Is it not the duty of intelligent philanthropy and 
justice, without destroying civilization, to adopt a 
better system of economy and transform the artisan 
from a factory convict, condemned to misery and 
ill-health, into a free producer of wealth, who enjoys, 
the fruits of his labor himself, and works no more than 
is compatible with his health and his claims on life ? 

Every gift that a man receives from some other man 
without work, without reciprocal service, is an alms, 
and as such is deeply immoral. 

Not in the impossible " return to Nature" lies heal- 
ing for human misery, but in the reasonable organiza- 
tion of our struggle with nature — I might say, in uni- 
versal and obligatory service against it, from which 
only the crippled should be exempted. 

In England it was Tolstoy's sexual morality that ex- 
cited the greatest interest ; for in that country 
economic reasons condemn a formidable number of 
girls, particularly of the educated classes, to forego 
marriage ; and, from a theory which honored chastity 
as the highest dignity and noblest human destiny, and 



105 

branded marriage with gloomy wrath as abominable 
depravity, these poor creatures would naturally derive 
rich consolation for their lonely, empty lives and their 
cruel exclusion from the possibility of fulfilling their 
natural calling. 

So it appears that Nordau, too, shares " the 
degenerate's incapacity for self-adaptation, 
and the resultant discomfort in the midst of 
circumstances to which, in consequence of his 
organic deficiencies, he cannot accommodate 
himself." Is he not, indeed, the author of 
Conventional Lies of Civilization? But he 
has his usual easy way out of the dilemma. 
If Ibsen and Wagner are dissatisfied with the 
world, that is because the world is too good 
for them; but, if Max Nordau is dissatisfied, 
it is because Max is too good for the world. 
His modesty does not permit him to draw the 
distinction in these exact terms. Here is his 
statement of it : 

Discontent shows itself otherwise in the degenerate 
than in reformers. The latter grow angry over real 
evils only, and make rational proposals for their 
remedy which are in advance of the time : these reme- 



106 

dies may presuppose a better and wiser humanity than 
actually, exists ; but at least they are capable of being 
defended on reasonable grounds. The degenerate, on 
the other hand, selects among the arrangements of 
civilization such as are either immaterial or distinctly 
suitable, in order to rebel against them. His fury has 
either ridiculously insignificant aims, or simply beats 
the air. He either gives no earnest thought to im- 
provement, or hatches astoundingly mad projects for 
making the world happy. His fundamental frame of 
mind is persistent rage against everything and every- 
one, which he displays in venomous phrases, savage 
threats, and the destructive mania of wild beasts. 
Wagner is a good specimen of this species. 

Wagner was named because the passage 

occurs in the almost incredibly foolish chapter 

which is headed with his name. In another 

chapter it might have been Ibsen, or Tolstoy, 

or Ruskin, or William Morris, or any other 

eminent artist who shares Nordau's objection, 

and yours and mine, to our existing social 

arrangements. In the face of this, it is really 

impossible to deny oneself the fun of asking 

Nordau, with all possible good humor, who he 

is and what he is, that he should rail in this 

fashion at ffreat men. Wagner was discon- 



107 

tented with the condition of musical art in 
Europe. In essay after essay he pointed out 
with the most laborious exactitude what it was 
he complained of, and how it might be reme- 
died. He not only shewed, in the teeth of the 
most envenomed opposition from all the dun- 
derheads, pedants, and vested interests in Eu- 
rope, what the musical drama ought to be as a 
work of art, but how theatres for its proper 
performance should be managed — nay, how 
they should be built, down to the arrangement 
of the seats and the position of the instruments 
in the orchestra. And he not only shewed this 
on paper, but he successfully composed the 
music dramas, built a model theatre, gave the 
model performances, did the impossible ; so 
that there is now nobody left, not even Hans- 
lick, who cares to stultify himself by repeating 
the old anti- Wagner cry of craziness and Im- 
possibilism — nobody, save only Max Nordau, 
who, like a true journalist, is fact-proof. 
William Morris objected to the abominable 
ugliness of early Victorian decoration and 



108 

furniture, to the rhymed rhetoric which did 
duty for poetry from the Renaissance to the 
nineteenth century, to kamptulicon stained 
glass, and, later on, to the shiny commercial 
gentility of typography according to the 
American ideal, which was being spread 
through England by Harper's Magazine and 
The Century, and which had not, like your 
abolition of " justification " in Liberty, the ad- 
vantage of saving trouble. Well, did he sit 
down, as Nordau suggests, to rail helplessly 
at the men who were at all events getting the 
work of the world done, however in artisti- 
cally? Not a bit of it: he designed and man- 
ufactured the decorations he wanted, and 
furnished and decorated houses with them; 
he put into public halls and churches tapes- 
tries and picture-windows which cultivated 
people now travel to see as they travel to see 
first-rate fifteenth-century work in that kind; 
the books from his Kelmscott Press, printed 
with type designed by his own hand, are 
pounced on by collectors like the treasures of 



109 

our national museums, all this work, remem- 
ber, involving the successful conducting of a 
large business establishment and factory, and 
being relieved by the incidental production of 
a series of poems and prose romances which 
placed their author in the position of the 
greatest living English poet. Now let me re- 
peat the terms in which Nordau describes this 
kind of activity. " Ridiculously insignificant 
aims — beating the air — no earnest thought to 
improvement — astoundingly mad projects for 
making the world happy — persistent rage 
against everything and everyone, displayed in 
venomous phrases, savage threats, and de- 
structive mania of wild beasts." Is there not 
something deliciously ironical in the ease with 
which a splenetic pamphleteer, with nothing 
to shew for himself except a bookful of blun- 
ders tacked on to a mock scientific theory 
picked up at second hand from a few lunacy 
doctors with a literary turn, should be able 
to create a European scandal by declaring 
that the greatest creative artists of the cen- 



110 

tury are barren and hysterical madmen? I 
do not know what the American critics have 
said about Nordau; but here the tone has 
been that there is much in what he says, and 
that he is evidently an authority on the sub- 
jects with which he deals. And yet I assure 
you, on my credit as a man who lives by art 
criticism, that from his preliminary descrip- 
tion of a Morris design as one "on which 
strange birds flit among crazily ramping 
branches, and blowzy flowers coquet with 
vain butterflies " (which is about as sensible 
as a description of the Norman chapel in the 
Tower of London as a characteristic specimen 
of Baroque architecture would be) to his 
coupling of Cimabue and Fra Angelico as 
primitive Florentine masters; from his un- 
ashamed bounce about " the conscientious ob- 
servance of the laws of counterpoint " by 
Beethoven and other masters celebrated for 
breaking them, to his unlucky shot about " a 
pedal bass with correct harmonization " (a 
pedal bass happening to be the particular in- 



Ill 

stance in which even the professor-made rules 
of " correct harmonization '' are suspended), 
Nordau exposes his sciolism time after time as 
an authority upon the fine arts. But his 
critics, being for the most part ignorant lit- 
erary men like himself, with sharpened wits 
and neglected eyes and ears, have swallowed 
Cimabue and Ghirlandajo and the pedal bass 
like so many gulls. Here an Ibsen admirer 
may maintain that Ibsen is an exception to 
the degenerate theory and should be classed 
with Goethe; there a Wagnerite may plead 
that Wagner is entitled to the honors of Beet- 
hoven; elsewhere one may find a champion of 
Rossetti venturing cautiously to suggest a sus- 
picion of the glaringly obvious fact that Nor- 
dau has read only the two or three popular 
ballads like The Blessed Damozel, Eden 
Bower, Sister Helen, and so on, which every 
smatterer reads, and that his knowledge of 
the mass of pictorial, dramatic, and decorative 
work turned out by Rossetti, Burne-Jones, 
Ford Madox Brown, William Morris, and 



112 

Holman Hunt, without a large knowledge and 
careful study of which no man can possibly 
speak with any critical authority of the pre- 
Raphaelite movement, is apparently limited to 
a glance at Holman Hunt's Shadow of the 
Cross, or possibly an engraving thereof. But 
in the main he is received as a serious author- 
ity on his subjects; and that is why we too, 
without malice and solely as a matter of 
public duty, are compelled to take all this 
trouble to destroy him. 

And now, my dear Tucker, I have told you 
as much about Nordau's book as it is worth. 
In a country where art was really known to 
the people, instead of being merely read 
about, it would not be necessary to spend 
three lines on such a work. But in England, 
where nothing but superstitious awe and self- 
mistrust prevents most men from thinking 
about art as Nordau boldly speaks about it; 
where to have a sense of art is to be one in a 
thousand, the other nine hundred and ninety- 
nine being either Philistine voluptuaries or 



113 

Calvinistic anti-voluptuaries, it is useless to 
pretend that Nordau's errors will be self-evi- 
dent. Already we have native writers, with- 
out half his cleverness or energy of expression, 
clnmsily imitating his sham scientific vivisec- 
tion in their attacks on artists whose work 
they happen to dislike. Therefore, in rivet- 
ing his book to the counter, I have used a 
nail long enough to go through a few pages 
by other people as well; and that must be my 
excuse for my disregard of the familiar edi- 
torial stigma of degeneracy which Nordau 
calls Agoraphobia, or Fear of Space. 



innnX 0F C0 NGRESS 



022 211 871" 2 



